The Oxford Handbook of Food History

Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher

The Oxford Handbook of Food History

Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher

Description

Food matters, not only as a subject of study in its own right, but also as a medium for conveying critical messages about capitalism, the environment, and social inequality to diverse audiences. Recent scholarship on the subject draws from both a pathbreaking body of secondary literature and an inexhaustible wealth of primary sources--from ancient Chinese philosophical tracts to McDonald's menus--contributing new perspectives to the historical study of food, culture, and society, and challenging the limits of history itself. The Oxford Handbook of Food History places existing works in historiographical context, crossing disciplinary, chronological, and geographic boundaries while also suggesting new routes for future research. The twenty-seven essays in this book are organized into five sections: historiography, disciplinary approaches, production, circulation, and consumption of food. The first two sections examine the foundations of food history, not only in relation to key developments in the discipline of history itself--such as the French Annales school and the cultural turn--but also in anthropology, sociology, geography, pedagogy, and the emerging Critical Nutrition Studies. The following three sections sketch various trajectories of food as it travels from farm to table, factory to eatery, nature to society. Each section balances material, cultural, and intellectual concerns, whether juxtaposing questions of agriculture and the environment with the notion of cookbooks as historical documents; early human migrations with modern culinary tourism; or religious customs with social activism. In its vast, interdisciplinary scope, this handbook brings students and scholars an authoritative guide to a field with fresh insights into one of the most fundamental human concerns.

The Oxford Handbook of Food History

Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher

Author Information

Jeffrey M. Pilcher is professor of history, University of Minnesota. His books include The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890-1917; Food in World History; and Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity, which won the Thomas F. McGann Memorial Prize.

Contributors:

Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. He is the author of many books on topics ranging from Renaissance nutrition and fine dining to beans, as well as a cookbook. He has edited three food series with twenty-nine volumes in print and is co-editor of the journal Food, Culture and Society.

Rachel A. Ankeny is Program Coordinator for the new Food Studies Graduate Program (and formerly was Program Manager for the Graduate Program in Gastronomy) and Associate Professor of History at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her research interests include food ethics, food habits of women and children, and the relationship of science to cuisine. She also has expertise and ongoing research on health and science policy, particularly regarding public engagement and bioethics.

Warren Belasco teaches American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA. He is the author of Americans on the Road (1979), Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (1990), Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (2006), and Food: The Key Concepts (2009). He edited Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (2003-2009). He lives and gardens in Washington, DC.

Charlotte Biltekoff is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Food Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of dietary health in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Her book, Eating Right in America: Food, Health and Citizenship from Domestic Science to Obesity, is forthcoming.

Yong Chen is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, where he also served as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. He is author of Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943 (2000), co-editor of New Perspectives on American History (2010), and co-curator of "'Have You Eaten Yet?': The Chinese Restaurant in America" (New York and Philadelphia). His research on diverse topics such as Chinese American history, food, and higher education has been published in various leading academic journals and has received extensive media coverage in the U.S. and beyond.

Sierra Burnett Clark is a doctoral candidate in Food Studies and instructor at New York University. Her research examines daily constructions of tradition, heritage, and creativity in the restaurants of modern, global cities. She holds a B.A. in International Relations from Brown University and a Grande Diplôme in Culinary Arts from the French Culinary Institute.

Carole Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. For thirty years she has been studying ethnographically food, culture, gender, and identity in Italy and the United States. She is the author of The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power (1999), Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (2004), and A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (2009). She is co-editor with Penny Van Esterik of Food and Culture: A Reader (1997, 2008) and is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways.

Jonathan Deutsch is a classically trained chef and Associate Professor of culinary arts at Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York and public health at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author or editor of five books including (with Annie Hauck-Lawson) Gastropolis: Food and New York City, and (with Jeff Miller) Food Studies. When not in the kitchen he can be found playing tuba in community bands around New York City.

Tracey Deutsch is associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Government and American Grocery Stores in theTwentieth Century (2010) and teaches, researches, and writes on food politics, gender systems, and capitalism.

Rebecca Earle teaches in the History Department of the University of Warwick. Her research concerns the cultural and intellectual history of colonial and independent Spanish America. Her most recent book explores nineteenth-century elite nationalism's engagement with the preconquest past, The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810-1930 (2008). She is currently investigating food's role in the construction of the colonial body in the early modern Hispanic world.

Sterling Evans holds the Louise Welsh Chair in Borderlands History at the University of Oklahoma. Previously he taught at Brandon University (Manitoba), Humboldt State University (California), and the University of Alberta after having completed graduate school at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching interests include environmental, agricultural, and transnational history.

Paul Freedman is a professor in the history department at Yale University. A medieval historian, he has specialized in the history of the Catalan peasants, church, and nobility in the period 1000 to 1500. His work on food history has been developed over the last ten years. He is the author of Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (2008) and editor of Food: The History of Taste (2007) which was translated into ten languages. He is working on dining in the U.S. in the nineteenth century.

Donna R. Gabaccia is the Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of many books and articles on international migration, immigrant life in the United States, and Italian life around the world. Among her books are We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998), Italy's Many Diasporas (2000), and Foreign Relations: Global Perspectives on American Immigration (2012).

Rayna Green has served as curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History since 1984, following fifteen years in university as a professor of Native Studies and American Studies. She is known for her exhibitions, monographs, essays, and documentary productions on American Indian representations, performance, and American identity. To her customary repertoire, she has added exhibitions (e.g.: "Bon Appétit: Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian"), films (e.g.: "Corn Is Who We Are: The Story of Pueblo Indian Food"), and writings (e.g.: "Mother Corn Meets the Dixie Pig: Native Food in the Native South") on American and American Indian food and foodways.

Lucy M. Long (PhD, Folklore, University of Pennsylvania) runs a non-profit Center for Food and Culture and teaches food studies at Bowling Green State University in the tourism and American Culture Studies programs. She is the author of Culinary Tourism: Eating and Otherness (2003) and Regional American Food Culture (2009) and has published on a wide range of topics connected to food, ranging from Appalachian food and music to Irish soda bread to Korean restaurants.

André Magnan is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina, Canada. His principle research interest is the historical political economy of local and global food systems, especially as it applies to the Canadian prairies. He has published research on political conflicts over genetically modified crops, the politics of collective grain marketing, and the historical evolution of the Canada-U.K. commodity chain for wheat.

Elias Mandala received his BA and MA from the University of Malawi and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and now is Professor of African History at the University of Rochester. He is a student of African peasants, with particular interest in agriculture, food systems, gender, intergenerational conflict, and rural differentiation. His major publications include: Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859-1960 and The End of Chidyerano: A History of Food and Everyday Life in Malawi, 1860-2004.

Bertie Mandelblatt is a historical geographer, teaching in the departments of Historical Studies and Geography at the University of Toronto (Mississauga). Her research concerns commodity exchanges in the French Atlantic, focusing on the production, provision and consumption of food and drink in the French Antilles in the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on the economic effects of slave consumption in the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world.

Jeffrey Miller is an Assistant Professor and acts as program coordinator for the Hospitality Management program at Colorado State University. In addition to teaching various hospitality courses, including culinary arts, he teaches the Food and Society class at CSU. Prior to becoming a teacher, he was a chef in various white tablecloth hospitality operations for 20 years.

Corrie E. Norman holds the Doctor of Theology degree from Harvard University. She has authored several articles on food and religion along with books and articles on religion and culture in the United States and Italy. She is at work on a book on spirituality and food in contemporary America.

Enrique C. Ochoa is Professor of Latin American Studies and History at California State University, Los Angeles. His publications include Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food Since 1910 (2000) and Latina/o Los Angeles: Migrations, Communities, and Political Activism (co-editor, 2005). His current book project is entitled Sin Maíz, No Hay País: Mexico's Struggle for Food Sovereignty. From 2006 to 2008, he was the Michi and Walter Weglyn Endowed Chair of Multicultural Studies at Cal Poly Pomona.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, William F. Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin, is a native of Japan. Her research foci have been on various symbols of identities of the Japanese, such as rice, the monkey, and cherry blossoms, in socio-political contexts and in historical perspective. She penned fourteen single authored books in English and five in Japanese. She was the Distinguished Chair for Modern Culture at the Library of Congress in 2009.

Steve Penfold is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the political, social and cultural history of North American capitalism, especially mass consumption in Canada. His last book was The Donut: A Canadian History (2008).

Gabriella M. Petrick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Her research focuses on the development of industrial foods and dietary change in twentieth-century America. In addition to her work on food science and technology, she is currently writing a sensory history of taste.

Krishnendu Ray is an Assistant Professor of Food Studies at New York University Before that he taught for a decade at the Culinary Institute of America. He is the author of The Migrant's Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (2004) and co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Indian Cuisine and the South Asian Middle Classes, forthcoming in 2012.

Jayeeta Sharma is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto, teaching courses on the history and cultures of South Asia and the British Empire. Her research and teaching interests include migration, food, race, labor, childhood, diasporic and post-colonial cultures. Her book, Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India (2011) examines the intersections of colonial tea capitalism with identity making in modern and contemporary India.

Alison K. Smith, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto, is the author of several articles on imperial Russian foodways, and the book, Recipe for Russia: Food and Nationhood Under the Tsars (2008). She is now working on a monograph on social categories and social mobility in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Russia.

R. Kenji Tierney received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and he is now an assistant professor at Skidmore College. He has published articles on the anthropology of food and sumo wrestling, and he co-edited Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within (2007).

Sydney Watts received her Ph.D. in French History from Cornell University in 1999. Since then, she has taught early modern European history at the University of Richmond where she is now Associate Professor. Her current research on Lent and secular society focuses on changing food habits and religious norms in early modern urban France.

The Oxford Handbook of Food History

Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher

Reviews and Awards

"Some of the greatest living food historians--Ken Albala, Warren Belasco, and Carole Counihan, to name a few--have contributed essays in their fields of expertise. This volume highlights the multiple interdisciplinary approaches to the study of food history and areas of future research... a brilliant contribution." --CHOICE